Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstrippedFive-Ninesthat dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Poet
Wilfred Owen was born in Shropshire, England, in 1893 and studied at the University of Reading. Because he could not afford to continue his education, he left school and worked as an English-language tutor in France while also writing poetry. After the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the loss of so many young lives horrified him. Nevertheless, after returning home in 1915, he enlisted in the Artist's Rifles of the British army, received a commission, and shipped out to France in late December 1916. Over the next several months, he wrote poetry to record his impressions of the war. In the spring of 1917, he exhibited symptoms of shell shock after experiencing the hell of trench warfare. He also contracted trench fever, a bacterial infection transmitted by lice. His superiors returned him to Britain, where he underwent treatment at a war hospital in Craiglockhart, Scotland, then a suburb of Edinburgh and now part of the city. While there, he continued to write poems, one of which was ―Dulce et Decorum Est.‖ An experienced poet who was also receiving treatment, Siegrfied Sassoon (1886-1967), helped him edit and polish his work. After his discharge from the hospital, Owen mingled with poets and wrote more poetry. His work by this time was showing great promise. Eventually, he returned to the army—and to war. He died in action in France just one week before the war ended (November 11, 1918). He was only twenty-five. However, his war poems, including ―Dulce et Decorum Est" and "Anthem‖ lived on and today remain as meaningful and relevant as when he wrote them.
Summary
Wilfred Owen is one of the most famous war poets. He was born in 1893 and died in 1918, just one week from the end of World War One. His poetry is characterised by powerful descriptions of the conditions faced by soldiers in the trenches
The opening of the poem suggests Owen pities the state to which the soldiers have fallen. Instead of youthful, strong fighters they are 'Bent double', 'Knock-kneed, coughing like hags'. Owen's imagery presents the men as prematurely old and weakened. War has broken these men, and they are described in the most unglamorous, inglorious manner. Owen's bitterness at this transformation is obvious.
Owen's disillusionment with war is also clear from the closing lines of the poem. After describing the horrifying effects of the gas attack he addresses the reader:
'My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie'
He is rejecting the accepted attitude back at home that serving your country in war is glorious. He is critical of the 'high zest', or great enthusiasm, used to convince men to go to war. He sees war as brutal and wasteful of young lives. His choice of the word 'children' is also significant; impressionable young men are almost lured to war by the promise of 'desperate glory'.
In October 1917 Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother from Craiglockhart, "Here is a gas poem, done yesterday……..the famous Latin tag (from Horace, Odes) means of course it is sweet and meet to die for one's country. Sweet! and decorous!"
While the earliest surviving draft is dated 8th October 1917, a few months later, at Scarborough or Ripon, he revised it.
The title is ironic. The intention was not so much to induce pity as to shock, especially civilians at home who believed war was noble and glorious.
It comprises four unequal stanzas, the first two in sonnet form, the last two looser in structure.
Stanza 1 sets the scene. The soldiers are limping back from the Front, an appalling picture expressed through simile and metaphor. Such is the men's wretched condition that they can be compared to old beggars, hags (ugly old women). Yet they were young! Barely awake from lack of sleep, their once smart uniforms resembling sacks, they cannot walk straight as their blood-caked feet try to negotiate the mud. "Blood-shod" seems a dehumanising image- we think of horses shod not men. Physically and mentally they are crushed. Owen uses words that set up ripples of meaning beyond the literal and exploit ambiguity. "Distant rest" - what kind of rest? For some the permanent kind? "Coughing" finds an echo later in the poem, while gas shells dropping softly suggests a menace stealthy and devilish. Note how in line 8 the rhythm slackens as a particularly dramatic moment approaches.
In Stanza 2, the action focuses on one man who couldn't get his gas helmet on in time. Following the officer's command in line 9, "ecstasy" (of fumbling) seems a strange word until we realise that medically it means a morbid state of nerves in which the mind is occupied solely with one idea. Lines 12-14 consist of a powerful underwater metaphor, with succumbing to poison gas being compared to drowning. "Floundering" is what they're already doing (in the mud) but here it takes on more gruesome implications as Owen introduces himself into the action through witnessing his comrade dying in agony.
Stanza 3. The aftermath. From straight description Owen looks back from a new perspective in the light of a recurring nightmare. Those haunting flares in stanza 1 foreshadowed a more terrible haunting in which a friend, dying, "plunges at me" before "my helpless sight", an image Owen will not forget.
Another aspect again marks Stanza 4. Owen attacks those people at home who uphold the war's continuance unaware of its realities. If only they might experience Owen's own "smothering dreams" which replicate in small measure the victim's sufferings. Those sufferings Owen goes on to describe in sickening detail.
The "you" whom he addresses in line 17 can imply people in general but also perhaps, one person in particular, the "my friend" identified as Jessie Pope, children's fiction writer and versifier whose patriotic poems epitomised the glorification of war that Owen so despised. Imagine, he says, the urgency, the panic that causes a dying man to be "flung" into a wagon, the "writhing" that denotes an especially virulent kind of pain. Hell seems close at hand with the curious simile "like a devil's sick of sin". Sick in what sense? Physically? Satiated? Then that "jolt". No gentle stretcher-bearing here but agony intensified. Owen's imagery is enough to sear the heart and mind.
There are echoes everywhere in Owen and with "bitter as the cud", we are back with "those who die as cattle". (ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH). "Innocent" tongues? Indeed, though some tongues were anything but innocent in Owen's opinion. Jessie Pope for one perhaps, his appeal to whom as "my friend" is doubtless ironic, and whose adopted creed, the sweetness and meetness of dying for one's country he denounces as a lie which children should never be exposed to.
A poem seemingly written at white heat. Harsh, effective in the extreme, yet maybe too negative to rank among Owen's finest achievements: those poems in which he transcends the scorn and the protest and finds the pity.
The Title and Final Sentence
The title is part of the Latin quotation at the end of the poem: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Here is Owen's own translation of the quotation: It is sweet and meet to die for one's country. Others have translated the third word, decorum, as glorious, noble, or fittinginstead of meet. The source of the quotation is the second ode in Book III of Carmina (Odes) by the ancient Roman writer Quintus Horatius Flaccus, or Horace
Meter
The meter pattern of the poem is iambic pentameter, which consists of five pairs of syllables. The first syllable of each pair is unstressed; the second, stressed. The first two lines of the poem demonstrate the pattern.
.......1................2................3...............4..................5
Bent DOU..|..ble, LIKE..|..old BEG..|..gars UN..|..der SACKS,
...........1......................2..................3......................4......................5
Knock- KNEED,..|..cough ING..|..like HAGS,..|..we CURSED..|..through SLUDGE
Rhyme Scheme
The first line rhymes with the third, the second with the fourth, the third with the sixth, and so on.
Structure
The first stanza sets the scene, a battlefield with war-weary soldiers on the march. The second stanza centers on the central image of the poem: a gas attack in which one soldier, failing to put on his gas mask in time, dies in agony before the speaker of the poem. The remaining lines present the theme.
Themes
WARFARE
As Owen describes it, war becomes a never-ending nightmare of muddy trenches and unexpected gas attacks. Interestingly, with the new-fangled technology of WWI, there doesn't even need to be a real enemy present to create the devastation and destruction. Set in the middle of a gas attack, this poem explores the intense agony of a world gone suddenly insane – and the unfortunate men who have to struggle through it. As the poem itself asks, how can anyone condone so much suffering?
SUFFERING
Physical pain and psychological trauma blur in this searing description of a World War I battleground. Caught in the memory of a gas-attack, the poem's speaker oscillates between the pain of the past (the actual experience of battle) and the pain of the present (he can't get the image of his dying comrade out of his head). As Owen argues, war is so painful that it becomes surreal.
PATRIOTISM
In this poem, dying for your country (or even fighting for your country) seems a lot less worthwhile than the trumped-up truisms of old patriotic battle cries imply. Strategically drawing his readers through the ghastly reality of life in a battle zone, Owen turns patriotic fervor into a kind of deadly life force. The people at home just can't understand how horrible life on the front actually is. The soldiers in war can't remember why they are fighting. Everyone, it seems, is lost: lost in a fog of war or in the useless ideals that sacrifice youth at the altar of national glory.
Figures of Speech
.......Following are examples of figures of speech in the poem.
Alliteration
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod.
some smothering
knock-kneed
watching white eyes
from the froth
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Hyperbole
Men marched asleep
Metaphor and Simile
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
Simile: Comparison of the mist of green gas to a sea
Metaphor: Comparison of the gas victim to a victim of drowning
Onomatopoeia
hoot / gargling
Simile
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge
Comparison of a soldier's coughing to the coughing of a witch
EN1215_British & American Literature_content credits to original creators_Uploaded by Nisal Wanigasuriaya
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